'Why don't we get the car and drive down to Don Moulder's field and wait for them to come back to their camp? We'll see where Diane goes and we'll try and snatch her.'
'No.' Jim's voice was pitched almost at conversational level. 'I'm tired of being timid. Too old to be a hippy. Missed the boat. Missed too many boats.'
'Jim…'
'Why don't you stay here with the lamp and I'll go up alone.'
Juanita looked down at the lights of Glastonbury, thinking, God, one minute I'm worrying about his heart and his liver and the next…
'Jim!'
He'd pushed the lamp into her hands and when she looked up he'd vanished into a wall of mist.
Bloody hell. He was going up there to make a scene. At some point tonight he'd got this image of himself as a bumbling, ineffectual little man considered too old to kick ass, and now he had something to prove.
No way.
Juanita went after him, stumbled, her Afghan falling open. She was aware of a fringe of lights, and a man's hollow voice lifted up into the night, rhythmic and ecclesiastical, and that didn't sound like what they used to do in the seventies, not at all.
It started to go wrong very quickly, all in a rush, and it was so strong Headlice was just dragged down, like he'd lost the use of his feet, like they'd rotted into mush.
Because he was no longer above the Tor, he was inside it.
In this giant cave, full of mist.
It didn't matter too much at first that he had no control
… got to roll with it, man. I'm a shaman now, me. This is where they go, inside the earth, inside themselves… Until he realised that without feet you couldn't run away.
At some stage, he saw what seemed at first like only a darker part of the mist. It writhed. It became like a tree, with fuzzy outstretched branches and little knotty twigs, the kind of wintry tree you see through fog from a train.
And then it wasn't a tree because trees don't move like this: the branches were dark arms and the twigs were fingers, thin fingers, bony, wiggling like they were underwater and the currents were doing it, and he saw arms inside sleeves, torn sleeves, hanging like sodden leaves gone black.
He tried to clench his own fingers on Mort's hand and Steve's. Only nothing happened. He couldn't work the muscles. Clenched his fingers, but nothing clenched.
A ring. A ring on one of the wiggling fingers, a big one, size of a curtain ring. Headlice heard,… let me go… let me go unto my lord.
A figure in black with stains down the chest, this rough cloth around it, ripped in places, and stains, stains everywhere and a hard, powerful smell of dirty sweat, fear-sweat, and wet, rusty iron, like when you pull an old pram out of a pond, all black, the fabric rotted and dripping and the frame poking through.
No, I'm not going for this. This is dope in the fuckin' water. You get me out of this, you bastards, hear me?
The body was coming towards him in this kind of lopsided crippled way; it couldn't stand up straight, couldn't lift up its head. He tried to scream, feeling his throat working at it, pushing, but nothing coming out.
And the reason this ragged thing couldn't lift its head was because it hadn't got one, only stains around the neck of its robe.
Help me. Help me to my Lord Its hands groping out for Headlice. fingers waving like seaweed in shallow water. Headlice shrinking away. Fuck off… fuck off, old man. Leave me alone.
Dom, dom. dom. Heart banging away in his chest. Blood throbbing in his head. Drum going dom, dom, dom, and he could see the old man was offering him something. Something that had formed between his hands, a bowl, and Headlice reeled back; this was all he could do, throw his body' back from the waist, because his legs had gone now, gone into soup.
And the old man pushed the bowl towards him, but it was still joined to his hands, this bowl, this chalice, his fingers throbbing like veins in the curved metal. The old man was giving off long sobs, ragged as his rotting clothes, because he was as helpless as Headlice, this old man, didn't know what he was at.
Holding out the bowl, the old man said, Alan.
Which was Headline's real name.
The entity said, Alan. Real sick and sorrowful, and Headlice looked down and saw, briefly, a wavering shadow of himself in the mist, and he knew that he'd become part of it, another wiggling thing. Part of the darkness. He started to cry too, because there'd soon be nothing left of him but tears and snot evaporating in the dark.
Alan, however, Alan started to feel dispassionate about this, about his body floating away from his consciousness, or maybe the other way round, who gives a shit, roll with it.
And this was when the air thinned into a paler darkness, and he became aware that he was out of it, up in the night sky- again, over the Tor and looking down, and he could see everything very clearly. He was up here in the sky – thank you, thank you, thank you, gods – and looking down on…
… some miserable little sod scrabbling on its knees in blind circles, right under the church tower, surrounded by candle lanterns, it's stupid fingers dipping into the flames, but showing no pain. Just twitching and scuffling like a lost thing, helpless and pathetic.
They were lifting it up from behind, two people, an arm each and the drum was going dom, dom, dom, like one of them execution drums, dom, dom, dom, and he was looking straight down now, like looking down a chute, on to the very top of its head, where a swastika
…
Oh shit! Oh shit, man, it 's me That's me!
Being propped up like a scarecrow.
Rozzie was there too, watching, white-faced, but the bitch was avoiding touching him, and there was… it was Gwyn, but it wasn't. His face was long and black and pointed. His coat was off, his skin shone – he was naked – and so did his sickle raised, with the moon in it.
It was a hell of a shock at first, Mort and Steve holding the pathetic thing's head back, exposing its throat to the blade, but the next instant he'd realised this was only Headlice, a naive little tosser, so it didn't matter he was going to die. Anyway, it had begun ages ago, the death thing; the cut was like a formality.
Alan was above it all, directly above, exalted. Directly above the swastika, the sun symbol on Headlice's head, the head chakra, the opening he'd like projected out of – he could see the cord now, a thin strand of silver, like a wire.
All he could see of Headlice was a pair of hands waiting to receive the chalice, the Holy Grail, and then Alan dissolved into laughter because the Holy Grail was black and slimy and smelt of piss.
TEN
Verity lit a candle for the Abbot.
Its light might have created the illusion of a warm area at the heart of ancient Meadwell. It didn't. The light was as wan and waxy as a lone snowdrop in cold earth.
The silver candlestick and a dusty wine bottle, two crystal wine glasses and two pewter plates rested at the top of the oak dining table, which was as crude as an upturned barge.
On one was a salmon steak. They ate mainly fish, the monks, Colonel Pixhill had told her.
From the other plate, at the bottom of the table. Verity (who had never before sat alone here, who habitually ate in the kitchen listening to The Archers) was picking at a green salad, which, in this sparse light, looked grey.
She was perched like a sparrow on the oak settle under the window recess. At the top end of the table, behind the candlestick, was a high-backed oak chair with arms. The chair sat before the platter of salmon. There was a knife, but no fork.
The Colonel had said they did not use forks.